Thursday, November 06, 2008

Educational index by state

In refuting a defense of Sarah Palin based on the presumption that educational attainment is relatively rare in Alaska, Half Sigma asserted (with evidence) that Alaska actually fares slightly better than the national average when it comes to the percentage of the population with a bachelor's degree or higher. This spurred the creation of an educational index by state built not only on the percentage of the population successfully involved in higher education, but also on the percentage of the population that did not make it through high school.

Agnostic suggested tweaking the index to give more weight to states with large college-educated populations, rhetorically asking:

What if you defined the index as (SMART - DUMB) * SMART? Where the smarties and dumbies are about as common, the original and new index are about 0. But what about two states where there are many more smarties than dumbies, like Washington vs. Utah -- wouldn't you rather live where the fraction of smarties is larger, all else equal? (Which it probably isn't -- more expensive to live in WA than UT.)

Honestly, I just have an aversion to the behaviors of the hard underclass. Minimizing that is most important for immediate quality of life. I spend some free time in mixed working class areas and actually enjoy it. But that's being short-sighted on my part, I don't live there, I'm not raising a family, and anyway, the question was rhetorical so I shouldn't flatter myself in thinking it was directed specifically at me!

Doing this alters the index very marginally. Agnostic's is nearly identical to the original. The two correlate at .97.

Still, he makes a good point. Since the subject came up from Half Sigma's ongoing interest in the voting tendencies of smarter and dumber states, and 17% of this election's voters were postgraduates, I changed the formula so postgrads would be 'worth' 1.5 times as much as those with bachelor's degrees in determining a state's score. It is computed by multiplying the postgraduate percentage of the population by 0.5, adding it to the percentage of the population with a bachelor's degree or higher, and then subtracting the percentage of the population not having completed high school (all for people above the age of 25) and multplying by 100 for ease of viewing.

Following is the new index, colored according to the '08 Presidential election, with the inclusion of DC*. Light blue indicates an Obama margin of victory of ten points or less, and light red indicates the same for McCain:

Far from being an uneducated wilderness, Alaska is the most educated reliably red state.

Parenthetically, Steve Sailer has helpfully pointed out that younger populations, all else being equal, tend to be more educated than older populations are. This means red states look even worse by comparison to blue states, as younger states are more likely to vote Republican than older states are. The correlation between McCain's share of a state's vote and its median age is an inverse .29 (p=.04).

* As a city included in an index comparing states, DC is an outlier by default. Levels of inequality in DC are higher than they are in any states as a whole (inequality, incidentally, is a great thing for Democrats). Not surprisingly, it is an anomaly in terms of the relationship between estimated IQ and educational attainment of the population. Without DC included, the correlation is .59 (p=0). DC, however, does the best in the country on the educational index even though it has a lower average IQ than any state does, including those in the South.

9 comments:

Note the caution pointed out at Siggy's. It almost certainly is not true that 17% of the electorate has postgraduate degrees. It is more reasonable to say that 17% of the electorate have taken some course work beyond the bachelor's level. This would include, for instance, teachers who have to do some graduate work to maintain their certificiations, and liberal arts degree holders who take a graduate course or two while barista-ing.

I'd be interested in a link to that if you wouldn't mind. 9.5% of the US population has a graduate degree, which would mean postgrads turning out in numbers 79% higher than would be expected if each level of educational attainment voted at equal rates. That's exactly in line with college graduates as a whole--25% of the population has a bachelor's or higher, yet the group constituted 45% of the electorate during this election cycle (80% higher than expected).

I bet the average IQ of someone with an undergrad in chemical engineering is higher than the average IQ of someone with a graduate degree in education at just about any given school, but we're looking at the aggregate level of education, not necessarily intelligence.

What people who talk about this are really interested in are differences in white people, not the overall population. West Virginia's whites lag all the other whites in years of education tremendously. I've got the numbers somewhere from the 2000 Census.

But is it in a way that skews one way or the other? If the liars just inflate educational attainment across the board, relative comparisons between parties/candidates still work.

I know you have a thousand things to do with your new book hitting the press (I'm bummed I missed the Ron Smith show yesterday--by the time I paid my daily visit it was already after 4pm central), but if you have a link to white educational stats by state from '00, I'd really appreciate you dropping it.